With the increasing penetration of power electronic equipment in modern residential distribution systems, harmonics mitigation through the distributed generation (DG) interfacing converters has received significant attention. Among recently proposed methods, the so-called active resonance damper (ARD) and harmonic voltage compensator (HVC) based on voltage detection can effectively reduce the harmonic distortions in selected areas of distribution systems. However, it is found out that when traditional ARD algorithm is used to eliminate harmonic current injected by non-linear loads, its performance is constrained by stability problems and can at most eliminate half of the load harmonic currents. Thus, inspired by the duality between ARD and HVC, this paper presents a novel improved resistive active power filter (R-APF) algorithm based on integral-decoupling control. The design guideline for its parameters is then investigated through carefully analyzing the closed-loop poles' trajectory. Computer studies demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively mitigate the load harmonic currents and its performance is much better than traditional ARD based on proportional control.